A report has indicated that annual revenues from consumer mobile applications will approach $52 billion by 2016 as consumer smartphone adoption accelerates in tandem with the emergence of a mass tablet market.

According to Juniper Research’s report, the introduction of  operator billing across leading storefronts such as the Android Market and Ovi Store had led to a dramatic rise in revenues. Likewise, the mass deployment of in-app billing options meant that, for many storefronts, post-download revenues had surpassed those of PPD (Pay-Per-Download). While smartphones will continue to comprise the majority of app revenues over the forecast period, the report noted that tablets - which currently account for just seven percent of global app revenues - would comprise 25 percent of such revenues by 2016.

Other findings from the report include:

·    Most network operator storefronts will struggle to attract developers due to lack of scale

·    More than 31 billion apps downloaded to mobile devices in 2011

The report observed that the app store model’s pre-eminence faced the prospect of erosion in the longer term as HTML5 - a markup language which reduces end-user dependence on plug-in app technologies - facilitates the transition to a browser-based environment. In addition, the closer integration between web-based apps and handsets should mean that the advantage that native apps have is reduced.

This in turn offers great opportunities for content publishers to offer content on-site rather than be reliant on storefront distribution.

“While we are likely to see some larger media publishers - particularly those dependent on subscription revenues - migrating to a direct-to-consumer model (D2C), this is by no means true for the majority of companies. Most do not possess the scale of traffic to make D2C a viable option: in most cases, the storefront will continue to be the optimal discovery and distribution mechanism,” shared report author Dr Windsor Holden.

Measurement

Historically, mobile applications were developed and released without any inherit device side measurement and the primary metric was downloads.

“While downloads are an important metric, we have come to realise that user engagement along with recency, frequency, intensity and duration are more actionable metrics providing a holistic view of application success. Mobile application measurement has improved greatly over the last two years and releasing a mobile application today without measurement is heresy,” Greg Dowling, Vice President of Mobile Strategy and Measurement, Semphonic told EyeforTravel.com in an interview recently.

“Niche mobile application analytics vendors held a lock on this market until recently and in some cases still provide a superior solution, however all enterprise analytics vendors currently offer robust SDKs. The SDKs allow for the ability to measure all device side interactions (even when the device is offline) and by instrumenting your application with the appropriate level of tracking to capture metrics such as install date, app launches, daily usage, and key event success organisations will gain a greater understanding of actual application usage not just application downloads.”